Dick Francis

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Lore & Background

Francis was born at his maternal grandparents' farm in Coedcanlas, Pembrokeshire, Wales, though some sources report his birthplace as Lawrenny or Tenby. He grew up in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and left school at 15 without qualifications to become a jockey. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Air Force, piloting fighter and bomber aircraft including Spitfires and Lancasters, and spent much of his six-year service in Africa. After the war, he became a highly successful jockey, winning over 350 races and becoming champion jockey in the 1953–54 season. From 1953 to 1957, he was jockey to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. His best remembered moment came while riding her horse Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National, when the horse inexplicably fell close to winning. Francis called it 'a disaster of massive proportions' and his greatest regret. In 1957, after another serious fall, the Queen Mother's adviser advised him that she wanted him to retire from racing for her. Francis married Mary Margaret Brenchley in June 1947; they had two sons, including Felix Francis. Mary contributed to many novels with her experience as a pilot. The family lived in Blewbury, then moved to Florida in the 1980s, and later to the Cayman Islands, where Mary died in 2000. Francis died of natural causes on 14 February 2010 at his Caribbean home in Grand Cayman.

Reader's Guide

Dick Francis's significance lies in his unique dual career as a champion steeplechase jockey and a prolific crime novelist. His first book, the autobiography The Sport of Queens (1957), led to a 16-year stint as racing correspondent for the Sunday Express. He then produced more than 40 international best-sellers, nearly all set in the world of horse racing. His novels are narrated by protagonists who often face great obstacles and physical injury, and who learn they are more resourceful than they thought. Francis rarely reused lead characters, with exceptions such as Sid Halley and Kit Fielding. He also played a key role in saving the Grand National at Aintree in 1983, helping raise $14 million alongside Lord Derby. His work is noted for exploring the workings of various professions—photography, accountancy, the gemstone trade—always in service of the plot. Dysfunctional families were a recurring subject. Francis's writing routine involved a yearly cycle: writing from January to May, taking summer off, researching in late summer and autumn, then beginning again. He shunned book tours and the lecture circuit, preferring to let his novels speak for themselves. His legacy endures through his novels, which continue to be read worldwide, and through the continuation of his Sid Halley series by his son Felix Francis after his death.

Did You Know?

• Francis was first hospitalized from riding at age 12 when a pony fell on him and broke his jaw and nose.
• He received an emergency commission as a pilot officer on 29 July 1944 and was promoted war-substantive flying officer on 29 January 1945.
• Mary Francis, his wife, obtained a pilot's license and operated an air-taxi service as research for the novel Rat Race.
• Francis missed only one year of his annual novel output—1998—when he published a short-story collection instead.
• He helped raise $14 million to save the Grand National at Aintree in 1983, alongside Lord Derby.

The Jockey's Glory and the Race That Broke Him

Richard Stanley Francis entered the world of British steeplechase riding with the raw determination of a working-class boy from Pembrokeshire, the son of a jockey and stable manager. After six years of RAF service—piloting Spitfires, Hurricanes, Wellingtons, and Lancasters, much of it spent in Africa—he returned to the saddle in 1946 and quickly established himself among the era's most formidable jump-jockeys. His tally surpassed three hundred and fifty race victories, and the 1953–54 season crowned him champion of the British National Hunt. Yet the moment that defined him forever came at Aintree in 1956, when he rode the Queen Mother's Devon Loch to what appeared to be certain Grand National victory before the horse inexplicably collapsed near the finish. Decades later Francis still called it a disaster of massive proportions. His career was punctuated by broken bones and damaged organs, and after a particularly serious fall in 1957, Lord Abergavenny delivered the Queen Mother's wish that he retire. The injuries he accumulated would later fuel the physical suffering of his fictional heroes.

The Prolific Novelist of the Turf

Francis's transition from saddle to typewriter was neither sudden nor accidental. His 1957 autobiography, The Sport of Queens, written without the ghostwriter he was offered, became a bestseller and secured him a sixteen-year stint as racing correspondent for London's Sunday Express. That journalistic immersion in the racing world gave him the raw material for Dead Cert, published in 1962, which planted his flag in a niche no one else occupied: crime thrillers set squarely within the English horse-racing establishment. From that point forward he delivered a novel roughly every year for thirty-eight consecutive years, the sole exception being 1998, when a short-story collection took its place. More than forty of these books became international bestsellers. What distinguished them was the variety of his first-person narrators—artists, Jockey Club investigators, pilots, a film director, a wine merchant—each peripherally linked to racing and each forced to confront obstacles that often included serious physical injury. The villains, meanwhile, were frequently outwardly respectable figures whose respectability masked criminal intent.

A Life Shared, and a Life Lost

Francis met Mary Margaret Brenchley at a cousin's wedding in October 1945, and by his own account in most interviews, the attraction was immediate and mutual. Their families were not entirely pleased with the engagement, but the couple married in London in June 1947. Mary was a woman of formidable intellect and range: she held a degree in English and French from London University, had worked as an assistant stage manager and a publisher's reader, and had also trained as a pilot. Her experience in the air would later seep into several of Francis's novels, including Flying Finish, Rat Race, and Second Wind. The couple had two sons, one of them Felix, born in 1953. Mary contracted polio while pregnant with their first child. They spent nearly three decades in Blewbury, Berkshire, then moved to Florida in the 1980s and to the Cayman Islands in 1992. Mary died of a heart attack in 2000.

Saving the Grand National and a Lasting Legacy

By 1983 the Grand National at Aintree was, in the words of The Philadelphia Inquirer, standing at the brink of extinction. The British Jockey Club had negotiated a fourteen-million-dollar deal to purchase the land and preserve the race permanently, but the money simply did not exist. Two prominent figures from the racing world were selected to lead a worldwide fundraising campaign: Lord Derby and the novelist Dick Francis. Their efforts, bolstered by contributions from other philanthropists including American breeder Paul Mellon and Grand National winner Charles C. Fenwick Jr., ultimately saved the event. Francis's broader legacy extends well beyond that single act of rescue. Through more than forty bestsellers he made the inner machinery of English horse racing—its politics, its injuries, its moral compromises—accessible to a global audience. His characters, whether jockeys, trainers, bookmakers, or outsiders drawn into the orbit of the sport, carried the weight of his own broken bones and damaged organs. He proved that a man who left school at fifteen with no qualifications could reshape both a sport's public image and the landscape of British crime fiction.